Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors

Each year, the editors of New Hibernia Review select the outstanding learned essay to have appeared in the past year’s volume to receive the Roger McHugh Prize. The prize is named for the late Roger McHugh, first professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin (UCD), and includes a $300 cash award. The winning article for volume 12 (2008) is “Handing Away the Trump Card? Peadar O’Donnell, Fianna Fáil, and the Non-Payment of Land Annuities Campaign, 1926–32,”by Timothy M. O’Neil of Central Michigan University. The award was announced at the general business meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, held this year at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The award is funded in part by the office of Dr. Hugh Brady, president of UCD, and by the generosity of Dr. Maureen Murphy of Hofstra University.

The poetry of Seamus Heaney has, of course, attracted the attention of myriad literary critics. New Hibernia Review is pleased to note that three recent articles that originally appeared in these pages are among those selected for inclusion in a new anthology of articles on Heaney criticism titled Poetry Criticism, Volume 100 from Gale Cengage Learning. The articles are by Joseph Heininger, “Making a Dantean Poetic: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Ugolino’,” which appeared in volume. 9, number 2 (Summer, 2005); Michael Parker, “From Winter Seeds to Wintering Out: The Evolution of Heaney’s Third Collection,” from volume 11, number 2 (Summer, 2007); and Elizabeth Lunday, “Violence and Silence in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mycenae Lookout’,” in volume 12, number 1 (Spring, 2008).

Roddy Doyle’s immensely popular novels of Dublin’s Northside, too, have drawn their share of critical attention, as in Mary McGlynn’s examination of the novels in “Pregnancy, Privacy. and Domesticity in The Snapper: Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Family Romance,” which appeared in volume 9, number 1 (Spring, 2005). The article now appears in a revised form in McGlynn’s book Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (ISBN: 978-0-230-60285-4) published in 2008 by Palgrave-MacMillan.

The archaeologist Charles Orser has appeared in these pages on several occasions, calling out attention to the contributions of archaeology to our retrieval of the not-so-distant Irish past. His article “Vessels of Honor and Dishonor: The Symbolic Character of Irish Earthenware” appeared in volume 5, number 1 (Spring, 2001), followed by “An Archaeology of a Famine-Era Eviction” in volume 9, number 1 (Spring, 2005). Dr. Orser builds on this work in a contributed volume that he recently edited, Unearthing Hidden Ireland: Historical Archaeology and Anthropology at Ballykilcline, County Roscommon (ISBN 1869857941), from Wordwell Books.